Chapter Nineteen

  Along the scarred concrete, a trail of corpses wound outward in a meandering path from Santa Clara street, each more devastated and mangled than the last, and a thick layer of coagulation peppered with spent shell casings spread wide. Rifles, handguns, a variety of bladed weapons and dismantled war bots were left abandoned, waiting for the scavengers to pick the place clean. Boot prints in blood led off into the distance. The attack was over, but there were no winners. On what was left of the makeshift fortifications the Black Hands erected before the battle, a woman missing half her face wandered around lost in shell-shock. Her dog tags gleamed prominently, and she was one of the only survivors. Each life sacrificed in defense of the gang’s assets meant nothing. A few of the brave residents exited their apartments, but hadn’t yet worked up to picking through the remains for things to pawn. The ZenTech convoy vehicles were in disarray, several charred craters between them, all the metal twisted and wrenched into strange shapes. The accelerator of a flipped Humvee was stuck down, and the wheels spun impotently in the air as the groan of the engine played a requiem in the aftermath. The dead moon fragments above were unphased.

  Malory tried to commandeer one of the armored cars near the end of the fight. She’d destroyed most of them with her last few grenades, but had to wrestle control from a terrified supervisor trying to flee. She wrenched open the passenger door with her implanted arm, climbed in, and smashed him in the face with her stained boots. He tried to raise his forearms for protection, but it didn’t make a difference. Her heel caved in the flimsy cartilage of his nose and jolted his head into the seat. When she tried to bring the Lantern around for a definitive end, the supervisor was conscious enough to slam his foot on the gas to send the car careening backwards. It threw her off balance, and rounds burrowed into soft leather and out the back window. Shattered glass rained on the blacktop speeding past. Mal wasn’t able to aim again, so she pivoted her weight and thrust a metal fist into his rib cage. It tore through skin, ribs, and kept going up to the elbow. The man gasped, shook, and went limp, his foot sliding from the pedal. She took hold of the steering wheel, dragged him out of the seat from his insides, and took control. Her arm pulled free with a wet pop.

  Malory didn’t stop the car. Instead, she yanked on the steering wheel to spin it around with the tires squealing and sped off down the street. She’d only driven once before, and sideswiped a parked car in the process, showering the night with bright sparks. When she shook the gore off her arm, she made an effort not to breathe through her nose; the supervisor voided his bowels when he died, and the air was thick with shit. It made her want to vomit, but she couldn’t stop. She had to make it in time. The traffic blurred around the vehicle, and civilians were forced to dive out of the way when she blew through crosswalks and red lights. Cameras snapped the vehicle details to deliver fines to whoever owned it, but it didn’t matter. s and product placements invaded her implant as she went, but she tuned them out. She drifted around a bend that led to a line of low-budget hotels, and there was a group of businessmen out front passing a brown bag between them. They cheered as she roared away, but one of them stumbled into the road in her wake and fell on his face. By the time his friends moved to pick him back up, her tail lights were pin pricks far off in the distance.

  You know this struggle is futile. There is no way to make it in time. Time. TIME. Memento Mori. All things must fly into the sun to burn down to embers.

  “Shut the fuck up!” Mal screamed. She pushed the pedal deeper, and redlined the engine. Danger didn’t matter as long as she saved his life. Overhead, a news channel AV flew steadily toward city center, its spotlight trained on an interesting scene far away. “Crawl back in the implant where you belong. I don’t need you.”

  I will never leave until you’ve retrieved the blueprints that belong to me. A taste of failure will make it easier to manipulate you, and I’m looking forward to the outcome.

  Malory didn’t answer, just clenched her jaw and focused on maintaining control. Everything they passed looked like it was standing still, and it reminded her of a VR game they used to play in class where scores came from unbroken streaks avoiding obstacles in the way. It would have been nostalgic if her sanity wasn’t dangling by a thread. The Doc wasn’t allowed to die. He wouldn’t. Couldn’t. The ghost clicked her tongue in the back seat and leaned forward to touch the radio. There was an electronic whir, and then EDM flooded the small space and drowned out every thought. There were only a few more blocks to go, and Mal willed the car to go faster, faster still. Outside, they screamed by a nightclub where a bouncer was in the middle of throwing a guy that got too handsy with the dancers on his ass and the noise drew the gazes of people waiting in line. Mal held the car steady with and reached down to strap the seat belt tight across her chest. When they made it to the block that housed the headquarters, they found the entrance swarmed with vehicles, but she didn’t stop. The armored car slammed into the driver’s seat of an idling van, and metal folded like flimsy paper. Chemical dust filled the small space as the airbags deployed.

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  There was a ringing in her ears and the steady beep of the collision warning system in the haze. The supervisor’s body was squished into a chunky paste against the windshield, and Malory’s ribs were on fire where the seat belt dug into her skin. She fumbled around in confusion for a second until she undid the buckle, and there was shouting somewhere outside. She didn’t pay it any attention, and dug around on the floor until she found the Lantern caked with fluids. She wiped it off the best she could on the seat until she was sure it’d fire, and then opened the door. She climbed out to a dozen flashlights trained on her face, and she blinked to try and rid herself from the nauseous spinning. It didn’t leave, so she relied on the implant and the ghost to tell her what to do. It wanted her to duck, so she ducked; a bullet whizzed past her ear and off into the night. It wanted her to aim at a forty-five degree angle to the left, wait two seconds, fire three times, dash behind a nearby Humvee, reload, shoot an ankle from underneath, roll over to a car—and she followed along with robotic precision. She tasted iron in her mouth, her lip split from the crash, and knew she had a concussion.

  Another shot, another body dropped, and Malory started to move on her own. Her aim was less sure, but she hit the mark anyway. She didn’t need the guarantee of safety the instructions brought. She was impatient; she had to get inside, so she crouched beside a tire well and inched forward until she had eyes on a portable turret and used her hack to brute-force into its control matrices—when she was in, her vision split. Her organic eye remained looking down at worn synth-rubber still warm from the drive over, but the other was swallowed into an aiming interface that highlighted a dozen different defenders. It was a similar process to controlling the cat bot Nadia had built for her, so it wasn’t as disorienting as it could have been, but her mind was a mess anyway. She had to swallow down a mouthful of vomit as she queued up everyone she considered an enemy and told it to fire. The massive barrels disgorged payload after payload, and each percussion hammered loud enough to blanket the world in noise. Malory watched it rip the men apart with glee, and shed her cover when it was done. There were no groans, no screams, and nothing moved. She stood in the wreckage, her and the ghost the only things left alive.

  The entrance was nothing but rubble and charred parts, the victim of a well-placed satchel charge, and Mal climbed inside to reach the lobby. The place always had an intimidating air about it, one of hallowed ground that threatened to unleash a deluge of hungry specters if ever disturbed, but the state she found it in reminded her of the accounts after medieval sieges where desperate soldiers looted, then burned whatever they couldn’t take. The walls were scorched and gouged out by gunfire, and red spread across the floor between the scattered bodies. The attackers had spared no one—if they were inside, they were considered combatants. Unarmed support staff never stood a chance, but Malory had no empathy left to spare for the innocent dead, consumed as she was by the desire to save only a single person. There were two guards posted nearby in the middle of a heated discussion about the noise outside—they debated whether or not the Black Hands had managed to call in a relief squad and whether the men outside could hold until the job was complete. They were distracted, so she shot them both in the face before they reacted to her approach, and stepped over them and headed for the elevator.

  It was frozen in a state of lockdown triggered by the security system, but it didn’t stop her. She ran an override and sent it straight down into the depths, right to the Doc’s lab. As the elevator descended, there were others in the headquarters still alive, still resisting. Ten floors above, two chapter masters locked themselves inside a panic room and observed everything through the cameras. Neither of them spoke, glued to their feeds. They didn’t pay attention to the outside door since they never expected the space to be breached, so they jumped and gave each other knowing looks when they heard the deep thunk of a charge placed against its surface. There was a military all-clear, and then it flew from its hinges. In the holding cells where Mal had been, a squad moved room to room and rescued everyone on ZenTech’s payroll, and executed the rest. They were thorough, systematic, and a girl the same age as Mal cowered underneath the bed and dreaded the approaching end. On the rooftop high above the city, an AV attempted to leave, its hold laden with countless credit chips and sensitive memories. It caught a surface-to-air missile in the rear and plummeted back to the landing pad where enforcers swarmed its broken form like flies on shit and overpowered whatever crew was left.